While certain naked bodies are considered high art, others are considered profane. Philippa Levine argues that imperialism, class distinctions, and the professionalization of science are the forces that have shaped the dubious distinction between the nude and the naked.

Imagine walking down your local high street with no clothes on. In reality, it’s actually quite hard to picture because so few of us would ever contemplate taking such an action. But if you did, you would endure stares and catcalls, as well as stand a pretty good chance of being arrested for public nudity or for disturbing the peace. Yet at the same time naked bodies are everywhere in contemporary society: near-nakedness is ubiquitous in modern advertising, there are several television programs premised on nakedness, and we continue to insist that to be naked is to be natural. Yet this apparent state of nature has always been fraught with significance: legal battles have been fought over it, children have been removed from their families because of it, books and art works have been banned for promoting it. And you don’t need to walk down the street without your clothes on to know this. For an apparently natural state of affairs, the condition of nakedness has occupied a remarkable amount of legal, political, theological, social, economic, and cultural space. Nakedness is less a descriptive term connoting the absence of clothing than a historically constructed and highly contested state.

Back in the 1950s, the influential art critic Kenneth Clark argued that whilst the nude occupied an important aesthetic niche in high art, the naked body was essentially despicable. He vividly distinguished the abject naked figure that signalled loss or absence from the aspirational artistic nude that encapsulated the highest beauty of the human form. The former, in his words, was a “huddled and defenseless body” whereas the latter conjured “a balanced, prosperous and confident body.” This delineation reflected a historical status quo anxious to banish carnal concerns from aesthetic judgement. Clark did not invent this divide; he was, rather, its astute and articulate messenger. Its roots are manifold, lying in part in religious sensibilities, in fears of sexual desire and its perceived consequences, as well as considerations of social status. Clark would have been fully cognizant of the fact that in ancient Rome a lack of clothing denoted slave or low social status; these were naked people, not nudes. Translated to artistic form, however, the nude was, if not sexless, then certainly beyond and above the grubbiness of physical desire unlike the naked bodies of pornography. In reality, of course, the distinction between artistic nude and naked was and always has been blurred.

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Nakedness is less a descriptive term connoting the absence of clothing than a historically constructed and highly contested state.

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